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Critic's Notebook; Shoving Through the Crowd To Taste Lyrical Nostalgia

By A. O. SCOTT

Published: May 17, 2001

CANNES, France, May 16—
''An English journalist once wrote that the name Godard contains the name of God,'' remarked Henri Behar, the moderator of Tuesday afternoon's news conference. ''And so, ladies and gentlemen, I give you God.'' The deity in question, Jean-Luc Godard, whose new movie, ''Éloge de l'Amour,'' is in competition for the Palme d'Or at the 54th annual Cannes International Film Festival, wore a rumpled tan sport coat and gamely entertained inquiries from the assembled journalists. ''What do you have against Steven Spielberg?'' ''What do you think of the Internet?'' ''Is there life after cinema?''

When asked how Americans might react to his film, Mr. Godard doubted that many would get a chance to see it (because of distribution problems), a difficulty faced earlier that day by quite a few of the people in the room. Unlike the other films in competition, ''Éloge de l'Amour'' was limited to a single press showing -- at Mr. Godard's insistence, rumor had it -- in one of the smaller screening rooms at the Palais des Festivals. An hour before the screening was to begin, the corridors outside the Salle Bazin were already jammed with a crowd far in excess of what the room could hold. As the doors opened, angry shoving matches broke out, and several people were nearly trampled underfoot.

Those who managed -- at the risk of life, limb and elementary civility -- to see ''Éloge de l'Amour'' found themselves in the hands of a sad, inscrutable but nonetheless benevolent creator. Perhaps Mr. Godard's strongest and most accessible feature since the mid-1980's, ''Éloge'' demonstrates that there is still abundant life in the director's lyrical, meditative and deeply pessimistic cinematic vision.

The film is divided into two sections, one shot in glowing, nocturnal 35-millimeter black-and-white and the other in crayon-bright, hand-held digital video. Together they compose an elusive but also unusually poignant rumination on the vulnerability of memory in an age of mass media. The disasters of the 20th century -- Auschwitz, Vietnam, Kosovo -- are high on Godard's list and are fated to end up, in the words of one character, ''a story starring Julia Roberts -- Hollywood, not history.'' One need not endorse the facile and familiar anti-Americanism expressed in the film -- and, arguably, by it -- to relish its ironies or be touched by its mournful elegance.

It should be noted that history, for all its terrors, occasionally favors surprise endings and unexpected jokes. Mr. Godard, the most uncompromising aesthetic and political radical of the French New Wave, turns out, in his old age, to have become something of a cultural conservative. ''Éloge de l'Amour,'' like many of his later films, is thick with musical and literary allusions to the grand European tradition and perfumed with nostalgia for the high culture of the 19th- and 20th-century bourgeoisie.

A number of the other French-language films in the festival, while less pointedly backward-looking than Mr. Godard's, are similarly immersed in high culture and examine the lives of affluent artists and intellectuals in an increasingly borderless European Community. (This is a notable contrast with the 1999 festival, at which the prize winners, ''Rosetta'' and ''L'Humanité,'' depicted contemporary Europe as a harsh landscape of alienation, brutality and exploitation.) Catherine Corsini's ''La Répétition,'' Manoel de Oliveira's ''Vou Para Casa'' and Jacques Rivette's ''Va Savoir'' all take place in the world of contemporary theater, and include scenes from plays by Wedekind, Ionesco, Shakespeare and Pirandello.

The troupe in Mr. Rivette's film performs in Italian on the Paris stage; the hero of Mr. Oliveira's performs ''The Tempest'' in French and ''Ulysses'' in heavily accented English. ''La Pianiste,'' a psychosexual drama directed by Michael Haneke with a fearless, terrifying performance by Isabelle Huppert in the title role, takes place in Vienna and uses the music of Beethoven, Bach and especially Schubert as a metaphor for the connection between artistic discipline and erotic pathology.

The intertwining of life and art -- the slippery distinctions between representation and reality, performance and experience, fact and story -- has been one of the great cinematic themes since the birth of the medium, and it is one that shows up at this festival again and again, revealing odd and serendipitous connections among filmmakers who would seem at first to have little in common. ''Éloge de l'Amour,'' for example, is preoccupied with the way life is corrupted by storytelling, and by movies and television in particular. In the second half, some stereotypically ugly Americans show up in Switzerland to purchase, on behalf of Steven Spielberg Associates Inc., the life story of an elderly couple who fought in the Resistance and survived the concentration camps. Such exploitation is also the subject of ''Storytelling,'' the new film by Todd Solondz, who was born in New Jersey the year Mr. Godard made ''Breathless.''